Rifle Camp Park, as it now exists, is a quiet, bucolic oasis set in direct contrast against the busy, noisy, traffic-straining hustle and bustle of highways and byways nearby. Now, for some still-unexplained reason, the Passaic County freeholders see fit to disrupt this calm by locating an 18-hole, disc golf course inside the park. That course would employ the use of flying discs similar to Frisbees.

While this plan may serve to increase use of the park, especially among millennials, it strays far and wide from the reason the park was set aside in the first place, or at least from the uses the park has traditionally served – for passive recreation and meditation with nature. It is hard to believe Rifle Camp was ever intended for the sort of use now being pushed by the freeholder board – a plan that again shows short-sightedness when it comes to the county’s parks.

We side with a recent letter writer to The Record who argued that the down-county part of Passaic County possesses so few green spaces and that “they must be left as natural as possible for people to experience the beauty and therapy of quiet ecosystems.” Rifle Camp, in Woodland Park, has been known for decades as a migratory bird sanctuary, a place people can go to walk the trails, sit and read at their leisure, or simply relax and take in the serenity in the company of passing deer or wild turkey.

The disc golf plan, which has been met with protests from nature lovers, is being funded through a $20,000 grant from the county’s health insurance administrator, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and would require the removal of around 100 trees and saplings. Horizon has given grants previously to county parks. As Staff Writer Richard Cowen reports, Passaic County has spent millions of dollars in recent years upgrading its parks.

In our view, a disc golf course is not an upgrade; it is an intrusion. County officials maintain the disc golf course would be minimally invasive, while a disc golf course designer said the course would not create large fairways, and estimated that the course was “no more than 35 feet wide at is widest point.”

What is troubling is that the disc golf course proposal at Rifle Camp Park coincides with a similar fight over Passaic County green space being played out in Hawthorne and historic Goffle Brook Park. Last week the State Department of Environmental Protection approved a county-backed plan for installation of an artificial turf playing field at the park, which was designed by the landscape architects, the Olmstead Brothers, and opened in 1931. Hawthorne officials have opposed the installation of the turf, which is estimated to cost $1 million.

This is not the first time there have been issues with the way the freeholder board administers county parks. Three years ago, the freeholders came up with a plan to hire 60 part-time summer workers to be employed at the park, and to use open-space funding to pay them.

There is nothing wrong with passive recreation. Everything doesn’t have to be about branding, or bringing in outside money. Some argue that the park is underutilized – by humans. The point is the park is there to be enjoyed by the tax-paying public when they wish to enjoy it. The plan to bring in a disc golf course is wrong-headed on many levels, and would no doubt change the character of the park.